Before the fun started:

The fun started:

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

For those of us who know their Shakespeare, in King Lear we also have a "full moon":

"As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk’d and waved like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee."

Of course, Othello knows all about the moon making "men mad":

"OTHELLO
What, now?
OTHELLO
What? Just now?

OTHELLO
It is the very error of the moon,
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont
And makes men mad."

He was
finally able to open the door using a tooth pick he had picked up during dinner.

Without
looking at him she walked through the door ahead of him.

He said
nothing.

The hotel room
was stuffy.

He hanged
his immaculate shirt on a chair so as to be able to show off his chiseled body
complete with bulging biceps and ripped abs.

She looked
at him with an uncertain look.

He
stretched and said nothing.

She averted
her eyes embarrassed.

He
stretched some more and kept on saying nothing.

She turned
about and left the stuffy room.

He
stretched some more this time with one hand behind his back.

He said
nothing because he had no one to say anything to.

Instead he
looked around and didn’t see her.

He
wondered.

He said
nothing but kept on thinking without saying nothing.

What?

Is?

Happening?

Should I
get dressed?

I think I’m
catching a chill.

Chill?

No. Maybe a
chilli would be nice.

Nice?

Uhm. Nice
France.

What? Where
is she, he thought in wonder?

Why did she
leave?

Did she go
to Nice?

"LEE!!!!!
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING UP THERE ALONE IN YOUR ROOM??? COME DOWN RIGHT THIS
MINUTE. THE FOOD IS ON THE TABLE."

(*someone
falling off a bed*)

NB: Even
with my brain almost completely turned off, this time around I just simply
couldn’t... I must try my hand at writing one of these. I believe they’d be a
huge success as well…No “guilty pleasure” can withstand this extreme awfulness…

sexta-feira, setembro 25, 2015

“Over the years, the biggest lesson we have learned from our workshops is that becoming a leader is not something that happens to you, but something that you do.”

“Leadership is like sex. Many people have trouble discussing the subject, but it never fails to arouse intense interest and feelings.”

The essays in the book:

What is leadership anyway?

Models of leadership style

A problem-solving style

How leaders develop

But I can’t because.

The three great obstacles to innovation

A tool for developing self-awareness

Developing idea power

The vision

The first great obstacle to motivating others

The second great obstacle to motivating others

The problem of helping others

Learning to be a motivator

Where power comes from

Power imperfection and congruence

Gaining organizational power

Effective organizational problem-solving teams

Obstacles to effective organizing

Learning to be an organizer

How you will be graded as a leader

Passing your own leadership tests

A personal plan for change

Finding time to change

Finding support for change

I lead an IT Business Unit for almost 8 years (in a SAP R/3 environment). Some of what Weinberg talks about resonated with me. Weinberg’s approach is as much about therapy and self-help as leadership. The best part of it is when Weinberg explores the reasons why he’s even writing the book at all. “Introspection” is the keyword here and I agree with it. If one wants to be a leader, one has to be visualize it. It seems bullshit, but it really works. I can vouch for it... It’s not a snake oil pitch…

I’ll try some introspection as well and try enumerating why I like writing book reviews/essays:

Keep on trying something new -> the blog serves this purpose (not being afraid to go outside my comfort zone, and try to incorporate something new in mind mindset, otherwise I risk getting overtaken by those who do)

Have a personal journal –> 750.com (Weinberg suggests that I should keep a journal, say five minutes per day, and use this to trace output as the starting point for debugging my life and work…I’ve done this on and off through the years. Maybe it’s time to do it more consistently.

As you can see, the book is as much about patterns of influence and self-improvement as it’s about technical management.

This people is excellent for people stuck in disempowering environments, and in the dysfunctional management behavior that creates them. To work in a successful ecosystem, there needs to be a culture of empowerment, support from the executive staff, and a set of definitions as to what we’re supposed to do.

On the other hand, having now been in the IT industry for some time I've seen many different things under the sun. I've a very particular idea on what it takes for someone to be a Technical Leader. The technical leader is rarely a person who has up-to-date skills. Many times someone moves his or her way up the chain to technical leader, perhaps having been an IT architect in "another life".

Unfortunately in IT, technology moves really fast and things change damn quickly. If someone was a developer say 5 years ago and now primarily does technical leadership, well, things have changed greatly since this person did software development. But since the technical lead hasn’t done coding software or architecture for a while his or her skills are really frozen in time to when they last did either of the roles I mentioned.

As an exception to this rule there are some technical leaders who actually keep up-to-date with skills, i.e., on the side they keep on practicing and learning new stuff. For my part, I always try to be on top of stuff technology-speaking, be it development, or other stuff. If one is not up to speed in terms of current technology trends what ends up happening is that the technical leader makes decisions for the practice that are based on old ideas. This greatly hurts the Praxis...

I've always thought the Technical Leader must have a lot of coding skills up his or her sleeve. In this case, God is not in the details, but in the code... At the end of each year every coder, engineer, or whatever you call yourself worth his or her salt should ask whether he or she's making adjustments to the structure of the solutions being developed and also constantly learning new coding techniques.

The best developers and Systems Engineers are people constantly learning and incorporating those changes into new solutions and this should also be the case with technical leaders.

There are some extremely adjustable and great people to work with, but the majority are just "sticks-in-the-mud". Avoid them at all costs...

I’ve always wanted to
read VGM’s take, not only because of the sonnets, but also because of VGM’s
“translation”. What VGM did was not really a translation. Why? Read on.

Before I proceed with
the review, it’s necessary to clarify that the system versification of English
is different from the method used in Portuguese. In English, the prosodic unit
is the foot, which contains a number of syllables; in the typical foot, there
is only one stressed syllable. The most used by Shakespeare verse, the iambic
pentameter, consists of five feet, each foot being one iamb - an unstressed
syllable followed by a marked one. In the poetry of the Portuguese language,
the verses are divided into syllables, some sharper, and other unstressed.
Because in the iambic pentameter we have five feet of two syllables each, there
is a rooted belief among translators and scholars of the English-speaking poems
in pentameter verse should be translated into decasyllables, thus allowing a formal
equivalence between the two systems. However, many translators have chosen the
Alexandrine, on the grounds that the English is much more concise than the
Portuguese and therefore to express all ideas contained in the original - that
is, so there is semantic equivalence – we would need to use longer lines. From
that point of view, the most important being: “In a poetic translation is
formal correspondence or semantics? Must we choose one of the two or can both
be achieved?

Vasco Graça Moura’s
translation has several glaring omissions, the most important of them occurring
in verse eight from Sonnet 1, "Thyself
thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel" translated as "cru inimigo de ti, teu ser desamas".
There is nothing in the sonnet that can justify the inclusion of
"Cru" (raw) in addition to "teu
ser desamas". Another big glaring misinterpretation happens in the
last verse: "To eat the world's due"
becomes "Comas tu o devido"; I don’t understand to what/whom “devido”
refers.

VGM made lots of lexical
changes, and one of them seems to have been caused by another interpretation
error: "buriest thy content",
i.e., “bury your content” has been translated as "te enterras a contento". Strange choosing…

Every time I write
about Shakespeare, I try putting into words why I love Shakespeare so
differently than other writers. I’ve
read many of the plays year after year.
But I never tire of them, they never become familiar...they are always a
visit to a mysterious world. That world
teaches me a great deal about people, all different kinds of people. But it also teaches me all kinds of things
about myself, all layers of myself as if I enter a Dream World, i.e, Shakespeare's Dreams. But
I also encounter spirits beyond this world.
Because of Shakespeare, I love fairies.
Sadly, our culture always reduces that word to homosexuality. Shakespeare of course may have meant that
interpretation on one level, he may also have been referring to alchemists or
Rosicrucians. But I also think that he,
like Yeats, believed in a supernatural world, and knew people who saw
"real" fairies and or practiced magic as in Prospero's Book. So when I "enter" a Shakespearean play, it is
like reading the Bible or the scriptures of other religions. I know that I will have to stretch myself to
deal with all the forces of the universe from the most ethereal and beautiful
to the crass and stupid and crude.
Shakespeare asks us to explore the whole realms of all the universe, not
just the ones where we feel comfortable.
And we are always exploring, in awe, discovering what is ultimately
mysterious which neither we nor he can fully understand. But he takes us by the hand and leads us into
these amazing mysteries that show us what it means to be human...and
divine...and evil...and in love, and in grief.

During the last years,
I finally realized that Shakespeare was writing most of his plays to an
audience who had lived through the plague.
20,000 people died in London in just one year of plague. I knew that fact, I guess, with my mind; but
I finally allowed that grief into my heart.
Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream
perhaps after his own 11 year old son had died, Judith's twin, Hamnet. So he writes these plays to try to resurrect
his own son, to give life to his only son. Shakespeare gives these plays to an
audience filled with grieving mothers and husbands and brothers and friends who
have lost people on the level of English people in a war like WWII. These people are learning how to live in the
midst of grief which shakes the foundations of their lives. Maybe that is why I always feel I am in a mystery,
confused, needing jokes, and yet horrified by cruelty and transported as if by
magic. I am never clear about what
Shakespeare thinks. But I know that I am
at the foundation of all life when with Lear I hold Cordelia in my arms. And no one, not even death or a stupid
government or religious wars can ever take her from me...never, never, never,
never, never. The pentameter rocks us
like a lullaby in our inconsolable grief until we find rest.

Reading the 154 sonnets
in a row, I've been thinking over the last week about the very transparent link
between the second balcony scene in R & J and two sonnets -- 50 -- 51
("How heavy do I journey on my
way..." and "Thus can my
love excuse the slow offence..."). It is almost as though Romeo could
have written both sonnets as he was fleeing to Mantua -- both knowing that he
has to be hasty, and hating the speed, and imagining the speed and joy with
which he would be returning one day... They are also connected by the idea of
"relativity of time" (Juliet says in the second balcony scene: I must
hear from thee every day in the hour,
For in a minute there are many days -- and that variable perception of
time depending on the state of mind is also the theme of the sonnets).

I thought I'd just type
in one of my favourite Shakespeare sonnet.
I'll type it from memory in hopes that any mistakes I make might be
helpful in pointing out where I might be misreading the lines (perhaps
stressing the wrong syllables, or getting the rhymes wrong:

Sonnet 33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye

Kissing with the golden face the meadows green

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy

Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

With ugly rack on his celestial face

And from the forlorn world his visage hide

Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.

Even so, my sun one early morn did rise

With all triumphant splendor on my brow,

But out alack! he was but one hour mine:

The region cloud has masked him from me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,

Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

As I said, I've often
wondered whether this particular sonnet is about Shakespeare's son, Hamnet. I
have no “evidence” to support this idea, but the possible pun in line 9, as the
sonnet makes a shift, the pun on sun/son, is one of the most common puns
throughout Shakespeare's plays (the man never thought of a pun he could resist
writing down). If the sonnets were
written in the early 1590s, as is usually thought, the timing would be right. Hamnet died in 1596, at the age of 11. One of the most beautiful passages in all of
Shakespeare, from the play King John, is sometimes thought to be the father's
tribute to that son:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

Prologue to Act II,
begins:

"Now old desire
doth in his death bed lie,

And young affection
gapes to be his heir;

That fair, for which
love groan'd for, and would die,

With tender Juliet
matched, is now not fair."

Etc. (read it, read it
read it!)

Being a lover of Shakespeare's
sonnets, I was mesmerised by the very beautiful ("unpublished")
sonnet that is the Prologue to Act II. Reading VGM’s decisions, I also decided
to take this sonnet and appraise it.

This sonnet is
expressive, powerful and magnificent. It describes succinctly how Romeo and
Juliet have progressed from previous loves and family feuds (as
"foe") to where they are now.

It also explains their
dilemma (as foe) and why neither wants to give a firm commitment of love (at
the start) - "Being held as foe, he may not have access". Juliet with
"means much less" needs another ploy to meet with Romeo to discuss
their plans. We find she uses the nurse as her agent.

This prolonged agony
and exchange is the making of the romantic drama that follows.

How much simpler (but a
much poorer story) it would have been had Romeo just jumped up on the balcony,
embraced her and they had eloped (galloped off into the sunset!).

And my attempt at
sonnetering using the iambic pentameter:

Poor Manuel is
disappointed,

A car break-down on the
way

His introduction to
Shakespeare goes un-anointed,

But Stratford-upon-Avon
is there to stay.

Man you need to
persevere,

Life's too short for
frustration.

So get your act into
gear,

Following Shakespeare
is your station.

Shakespeare is
performed everywhere

There is no need to
pine and stare.

Jump on the internet,
go to a movie

These formats can be
quite groovy.

There's no need to let
disappointment survive

Get out and let your
enthusiasm thrive.

(A sonnet by any other
name would smell as sweet!)

Reading the sonnets the
question I always pose to myself is not why did Shakespeare use the iambic
pentameter, but rather why he did in some verses break the pattern. Does this
matter? Who cares if one syllable or another is stressed? What difference does
it make if one line rhymes and another doesn't? Reading the 154 sonnets in a
row can reveal particular meanings and emphases, particularly when there is a
variation. If one looks at the line opening of sonnet 66: "Those lips that Love's own hand did make",
I noticed that the first word begins with a stressed syllable, breaking the usual
pattern. What did he want to say by drawing our attention to the pattern here?
Perhaps we are supposed to feel how truly in love the speaker of this line is. Who knows?

5 stars for the sonnets. 3 stars for the translation. 4 stars overall.

As I was translating this poem from Portuguese
into German, Novalis came to mind. For him there are three types of
translation: grammatical, mythical, and modifier. The grammatical translations
would be the translations in the usual sense. They have pots of erudition, but
only discursive capacities are at stake. Mythical translations are the ones
requiring a style at its most elevated level, and they present us with the most
perfect character of the work at hand. They don’t give us the perfect work of
art, but rather its ideal. On the other hand, with the modifying translations
we have, when authentic, the supreme depiction of the poetical spirit. In fact,
the translator using this type of translation must be a poet as well, in order
to be able to give us the idea of the whole in several forms, i.e., the
poet-translator must be the Poet of the Poet, and simultaneously be able to let
the alter-ego speak according to his or her own idea, as well as portraying the
idea of the poet in translation.

I’ve never been either a Poet or a translator.
That pretension is not mine. This was a translation by an Engineer, not by a
writer. For me translation is something I do to be able to get closer to the
Thing I’m reading. It’s one of the techniques I use when I’m close-reading
something. The higher the degree of inter-penetration between me and the work
of the author, the more I’m able to write about it. That’s the reason a lot of
my book reviewing is interspersed with translations.

In this aspect I feel closer to German than
English. I see my time rendering one language into another as hours out of the world, alone with fascination with language,
with the German language, and the author at hand. With English I’m not able to
do that. I’ve always thought German is the ideal language to express thought.
My paradigm is the beauty of the diction by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, or Andreas
Scholl. Of course when one goes to the German of Austria, what I hear around me
not always matches the paradigm of absolute perfection...

segunda-feira, setembro 21, 2015

Following on the footsteps of last year's celebration, this world-wide singing event, this time taking place in Portugal at Campo Grande's Church, happened once again, also with the participation of our own choir of "N. S. do Amparo" (see picture above with N. S. do Amparo's choir members, myself included).

When I sat down to write this post I kept wondering. Why do I love choir singing? Does the question make any sense at all? Do I ask myself why I walk and talk and eat? Maybe the question should be "Why shouldn't I love singing in a choir" instead. For me singing sacred songs is first and foremost a way of giving voice to a strong emotion and sharing it with the world. On top of that, choir singing makes me feel good in several ways: lots of times when I’m engaged in something physical and enjoyable like walking, cycling or singing the oxytocin is released in my blood stream and I get "high"...I believe singing should be part of the national health service...Another reason for loving singing with others is that singing this way creates something which is greater than the individuals involved. This is one of the cases wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Last but not least, and because music came before language, music and singing in particular it's a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into our human genome. We all feel the drive to sing, but not all of us feel prepared to break down barriers. I started singing as a tenor when I met my wife, who's a wonderful contralto, and I never looked back.

When I hear Scholl singing Händel's "Ombra mai fu" (I've had the pleasure of hearing Scholl singing live several times, the last time in 2012 at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and he always delivers the goods...), we can understand why singing is one of the most important human endeavours. On hearing Bach I feel as if I am now fully satisfied since I have seen my Redeemer...Wenn ich Bach höre, bringt es mir die Tränen in die Augen...

At the end of the event, and as bonus, we had a free style performance at the organ by none other than Professor Leonor Cadete. Father Feytor Pinto commented at the time he didn't know he had a pipe organ in his church capable of producing such a strong and full of emphasis sound...

This year's event recording hasn't been made available yet. To whet one's appetite, here's "Laudate Dominum" from last year's performance. Also the full event can be found here.

At school learned a lot of things: running
in the hallway, eating crap, dangling pencils from my nose, pop my gum, fake a
burp, paraphrase and summarize. Once in a while I also got acquainted with some
poetry. "Barca Bela" was
one of those poems I used to know by heart. Not anymore. Let me say straight
away that I learned poems at school at a very young age. When I was at the
primary school we did at least a poem a week from the very beginning. That was
the way for me to know a lot of Portuguese poetry. It was nice to get myself
reacquainted now with this poem and with a lot of Garrett's poetry as well
(Along the years Garrett's poetry was never one of my favourites). I still remember
my first contact with poetry at school. I had to learn by heart one of the verses
from this poem. After toiling for some time, I got to recite it in class. I
remember the teacher asking me what it meant, and I also remember what I said:
"Mas professora, a poesia não
significa nada." ("But teacher, poetry doesn't mean a thing").
What do I think about Poesy now and Garrett's poetry in particular? I've never
assumed that there is such a thing as the meaning of a poem. Nor have I ever
assumed that poems contain the same species of meaning sentences do, or that
meaning in poetry consists in the making of a kind of statement, i.e., the
laying out of discrete bits of information. Is it the metaphoric thing? Nope.
I've never thought metaphors have anything to do with it poetry-wise (I could
mention a few poems without metaphors; this alone made skeptical of the very
idea). On top of that I've always thought metaphors can be embarrassing (like
jokes do) because sometimes no one gets them...So, what's the deal with poems?
For me it's not important what a poem means. What is really important is that figuring
out a poet's true purpose is impossible. For me what really matters is what we
do with a poem. And not what it means. It goes without saying that the more I
know a particular author (Shakespeare comes to mind), the more I'll be able to
enjoy his work. That's one of the
reasons I enjoy translating poetry. It allows me to get in closer contact with
what the poet is trying to "convey".

Wonderful poetry always begs me to include
pieces of myself in the way I interpret a poem. That's the way it should be (I'm
not including here the so-called "modern poetry", which is a
different beast altogether).

And here’s my attempt at translating “Barca
Bela” into German, using my favourite language for translating the
untranslatable:

Schönes Boot

Fischer mit dem schönen Boot,

Wohin fährst du fischen?

Denn es ist so schön,

Oh Fischer!

Siehst du, wie der letzte Stern

Sich im Dunst verschleiert?

Hol die Segel ein,

Oh fischer!

Wirf das Netz behutsam aus!

Denn die Nixe singt so schön…

Ganz behutsam,

Oh Fischer!

Wenn sie sich im Netz verfängt,

Sind verloren Ruder und Segel

Schon bei ihrem Anblick,

Oh Fischer!

Fischer mit dem schönen Boot,

Noch ist Zeit. Drum flieh vor ihr,

Flieh vor ihr,

Oh Fischer!

NB: I’ll leave to you, dear reader, the
interpretation of the poem. I know what it means to me. But what is really
important is what it means TO YOU. “Barca Bela” is still one of favourite poem
in Portuguese. The rest of Garrett’s poetry not so much. Romantic poetry, as
far I’m concerned, needs something more…

sexta-feira, setembro 18, 2015

In the past I’ve bought this book two times.
Last week I bought it again, for the third and last time. I lent the other two,
but for the life of me I cannot remember to whom they went. The one I’ve just
bought won’t leave home…

Every time I read this book (I’ve read it
several times) I always come back to Rilke (no surprise there…). But more than
coming back to Rilke, I always wonder what Poesy does for me that Prose
doesn’t. What does it represent, i.e., what kind of world does it depict, and
what kind of operational forms does it use to transform our everyday experience
into something esthetic pleasing, and so forth. I’ve looked for the answer
everywhere (and I mean really everywhere: poets, in the poesy itself,
interviews with poets, etc.) After this “quest”, I came back to Rilke, i.e., I
decided to drop anchor. I’ve re-read Rilke several times, in several languages
(in German most and foremost, but also in English, and in Portuguese). Reading
Rilke, Trakl, Heine fell into disuse. Not to me. They’re not “fast food”
poesy-wise. Their digestion is difficult and they don’t leave us at rest with
the world. When I read them I’m not exactly looking for Daseinsfreude, the joy of the days to come. What I find in Rilke is
a poet who traverses the ruins and debris to find the sublime greatness of the
human soul. They are the poets of misery, sadness, impotence, terror, anguish,
and darkness. We all have a few of those within ourselves…

In Portugal Rilke has always been a major
influence: Sophia de Mello Breyner e Andresen, António Ramos Rosa, Herberto
Helder, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, and Fernando Guimarães to name just a few. For
a People worshipping Fado, that’s to be expected.

In the Elegies we have those ethereal beings we
call angels. In our western tradition they represent the redemption of Man.
They save us, they pick up our debris and what's left of us. And yet, these
angels, who are the mediators between life and death, the invisible
(transcendence) and the visible (Earth), are also terrible beings because they
carry within themselves an intrinsic darkness. Rilke's angels celebrate
existence and language through the only way available to them: the singing
("Gesang ist Dasein"). In
Rilke Singing and Being are merged. This merging is what allows me to find a
door into Rilke's poesy. The language of Poesy should be nothing but mystic in
its essence. Why? We can only be "saved" through the use of poetic
language, aiming at the wholesomeness of our nature, i.e., at an absolute and
redeeming utterance-ness of being.

Hatherly was able to produce echoes of Rilke in
Portuguese in a way I haven’t seen done before. In a very Rilkean way, she uses
the beginnings of the 10 Elegies to sort of deviate, but not really doing it in
the end.

Rilke’s 10 line beginnings that Hatherly uses
to “deviate from/recreate” his poesy: